Are you afraid to treat your business more like a business?
I talk a lot about pricing and profitability, about being more productive and using systems to help you with that and about phased approaches to get you from where you are now in your business to where you want to go.
But what if all this action taking feels so far away from where you are in your business?
Of course, you want to be more profitable and productive and have clear action plans but at this moment you're just feeling frustrated and stuck. You're seeing all these designers out there making 5-figure months and 6-figure years, offering brand strategy to elevate their positioning and their pricing and you're wondering how they are doing all these things and why you can't seem to make it work.
You know you're good at designing brands and websites and you know you have so much to offer your client but you just don't seem to get to where you want to go with your business.
It might even feel like you're business is taking over your life. That delivering the best possible results for your design clients is so encompassing that you're working evenings and weekends because you always feel like you're behind on where you should be. And that even when you're not working your mind is racing with all the things you should be doing.
So you know things need to change, you just can not go on the same way you've been doing. You need to be more productive and profitable but you're afraid to treat your business like a business. Because would that not take away all the creativity? Would that not make what you do impersonal while you pride yourself on the level of personalised service you give?
I know that everyone's situation is different, but in this blog, I want to share what I've learned from my clients (and my own experience) who have been in a similar situation.
Why you might be afraid to treat your business more like a business
When you recognise yourself in even just one of the things I mentioned above, the first step is to identify why you're afraid to treat your business more like a business. Reasons I have heard from clients are:
Because they were afraid that taking their business more serious would mean that there would not be enough time to be creative, which was one of the reasons they started their business.
Because they want to give a very personalised service to their clients. And they felt that if they would create workflows, email templates and automate their client processes they would not be able to personalise or provide the level of service they want to give.
Because they felt that it was too overwhelming. It felt too big because it was too far away from where they were. There was too much to do and they did not have a clear plan on how to get there. So they got stuck into the feeling they did not know how to run a business.
Because they had convinced themselves they were not going to make it work. They had been putting so much effort into their business but weren't seeing the results.
Or on the opposite side: because they were scared about the success they might have. The 5-figure months were so out of their comfort zone that they could not see it becoming a reality.
Because they knew it wasn't going to be easy. They knew they would have to learn new things or have to face things, like knowing their numbers, that they had been dreading. So instead they were focussing on those things that were easy and they knew how to do (the design work)
What is the impact of not treating your business like a business?
So we looked at what the reason might be for you to be afraid to take your business more seriously as a business but what about the impact that this might have on you and the business? You might not realise that some of the struggles that you're having are related to this.
Why? Because we tend to self-diagnose the problems that we're having in our business and instead of asking for a second opinion about the diagnoses (because we have a lot of blind spots when it comes to our own business), we also self-prescribe the remedy.
As a personal example: I felt I was really bad at writing copy for my website, so I invested in Copywriting for Creatives from Ashlyn Carter. But then learned that my being bad in writing copy wasn't the cause, it was the result. Because to write good copy you need to know your ideal client, their struggles, how they are talking about their struggles and how you are the best person to help them solve their struggles. And that was the part that I didn't know well enough so as a result, I was not able to write the copy.
So my self-diagnoses was wrong. In this case, the remedy was partly right because CFC is such a thorough program that it walks you through all the elements of your brand strategy so that you have all the elements that you need to write the copy for your website. But I still needed someone else's eyes on my business to help me dig deep into what I wanted for my business and how to get to know my ideal client better.
So what can the impact be from not treating your business like a business?
Again, this can of course look different for everyone but these are these 3 are the ones I see most often:
There is no clear vision for the business
When you don't have a clear vision you're missing a large part of the foundation for your business. As your vision is the driving force behind what you do. So what happens if you don't have one:
If you have no clear vision, what are you going to base your goals on?
Without goals, how do you know what to focus on daily?
Without focus, how will you make sure your business will be a success?
And without it succeeding, how will you get the freedom you've been looking for?
And because you don't know where you're going or what your enough-for-me-goals are, you also don't know how far you've already come resulting in constantly feeling like you're behind.
On a separate note: I think it's very important to not just have a vision for your business but have a vision of your life and how your business can help you to support that life.
You're reinventing the wheel for every client
When you don't spend time on creating workflows for your services, have email templates for every part of the workflow and the not-so-ideal situation and automate parts of your client processes you will have to reinvent the wheel for every client.
And I know this one can feel like you're in a constant catch-22. Because you want to work fewer hours but to get there you first need to work more hours to be able to create these workflows, email templates and automations that will allow you to optimise and streamline your processes. And this time needs to come from spending less time on client work, while you already feel you're not doing everything you want to for your clients.
But by not having this, you're 'wasting' a lot of time writing the same type of email again and again, or 'wasting' time by going back to old client projects to look how you've done something that time or not knowing what to say when a client isn't happy with the results.
And it's not just the time aspect, this also causes a lot of frustration on your part and inconsistent service to your clients.
You don't know your numbers
I know the numbers side of your business can be the thing you want to spend the least amount of time on as a designer. But this is a big one and can have a lot of impact on your business.
What I mean by not knowing your numbers;
Not knowing how much revenue you are making per month/year
Not knowing how many times you sell each of your services and what their contribution is to the total revenue
Not knowing if you're making a profit
Not knowing if each service makes a profit
So let's look at an example to illustrate the impact;
Let's say you are making 30K a year. And while you would love to grow in revenue, your main frustration is that you are offering brand and website design but you've come to the realisation that you don't want to offer brand design anymore. It does not light you up and your heart sinks when you see a lead come in for brand design. But you don't see how you can replace the income that you're making from this service, let alone grow in revenue without it.
But because you don't know the numbers that I mentioned above:
You don't have an accurate picture of the contribution of your brand design service to the total revenue.
You don't know how many times extra you would need to sell your website design package to compensate for the loss of the brand design service
You don't know if your website design package is making a profit or how much. You might need to increase the pricing of this package (if you're not or hardly making a profit with it), which would reduce the number of times you need to sell your website design packages additionally.
Just reading this list might make you freak out a bit because you realise this is not what you're doing right now. But I'm not calling you out on it so you can doubt yourself even more. I just want you to know that while numbers might overwhelm you right now, once you know them they can empower you, make you feel more at ease because you know where your revenue is coming from and help you to make better decisions than when you base them on feelings (which will speed up your results). And I am not just saying this as a former business analyst and pricing manager this is what my clients have told me.
Have a look at the video above in which I show you a way how to create a revenue overview in ClickUp.
And let's continue with this because the results of treating your business like a business could be the opposite of what you're thinking.
How your business changes when you start treating it more like a business
At the start of this post, we looked at a lot of reasons why you might be fearful to start treating your business more like a business and a lot of these have to do with your mindset or with assumptions. And from what I have seen myself and heard from clients, the results are often the opposite of what they expected would happen. Let's look at 2 examples:
Assumption: By treating your business like a business you will lose the option to be creative
When you no longer feel like you don't know how to run a business, when you know your numbers and understand where your revenue is coming from, how many services you need to sell to hit your target and have a lead generation plan to get you there you're not winging it anymore, you're not so overwhelmed of constantly feeling behind and a burden will be lifted.
This gives you more time for yourself and more brain space to be more creative. This gives so much confidence and will make you realise that while numbers might want to make you run away at the moment, they can make you feel reassured and empowered instead of overwhelmed.
Assumption: By creating workflows, automating part of your client processes and email templates your service feels impersonal
Can you imagine how much time you could save if you no longer have to reinvent the wheel with every client? And yes, you can save time and streamline processes without making it feel impersonal.
You can have email templates that include fill in the blanks sections that will allow you to personalise your emails. And you can use automated workflows so you have less manual work or have to think about what the next step needs to be. All you need to do is set up your workflows so that you need to approve the step before it happens. This will allow you to personalise those emails. And this will help you to deliver a much more consistent service to your clients.
And there you have it
There you have it, an (I hope) different perspective of what might be causing you to be fearful to treat your business more like a business, what the impact of this can be and how the results are often the opposite of what you expected would happen.
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